Today we shall comment on the three reasons given by the Holy Father for the drift to chaos, namely, in his words: “the divorce [of] civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being.”
The separation of Church and State is one thing; the separation of religion and politics is quite a different thing. I know not how the Christian sects in America feel about the separation of Church and State in this country, but I do know how American Catholics feel about it. In the words of the late Cardinal Gibbons: “American Catholics rejoice in our separation of Church and State; and I can conceive of no combination of circumstances likely to arise, which should make a union desirable either for the Church or State”.*
But because we Catholics are well content with the separation of Church and State in this country, it does not follow that we want religion excluded from politics, and neither does anyone else who is interested in religion or politics; for politics without religion is power-politics — Hitlerism or Stalinism — and a religion which exercises no influence on the morality of politicians is hokum.
It is our aim in this broadcast to suggest that religion and politics must be brought into closer relationship if democracy is to be saved. We have too long assumed in America that religion is concerned only with the individual while politics is concerned with society. A double disaster followed: While religion was limiting itself to individuals, irreligion pre-empted the social order, just as disease would rapidly sweep America if we left the problem of health to individuals and the State did nothing about it. Secondly, a two-code standard of morality evolved, one for individuals, the other for business and politics. The man who would not cheat his cook in the privacy of his home, had another morality in business and was the same man who would underpay his employee in the openness of his shop.
Religion is not to be divorced from public relations, either political or economic, for political and economic actions are human actions, and human actions are moral actions. For that reason the wisest of all pagan writers and the wisest of all Christian thinkers, Aristotle and St. Thomas, housed their treatises of Laws and Politics within the larger library of Ethics. This is as it should be for political actions and religious actions are subject to the same Eternal Law of God. There is not one law for a politician and another for a saint: Herod the politician will be judged by the same God who will judge the widow who dropped her mite into the Temple treasury. There is “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all” (Ephesians 4:6).
This does not mean that politics and religion move on identical planes any more than the body and the soul have the same function. Politics exist to lead free men to a prosperous and virtuous common life on this earth; religion exists to save men’s souls. But from both of them are born the two greatest loyalties known to man: the cross and the flag. “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21).
Since religion and politics are related, it follows that religion and democracy are also related. Democracy does not and cannot stand on its own feet, as if it were an absolute. There are certain presuppositions of democracy which are so grounded in religion that if you undermine religion, you destroy democracy. For that reason in this broadcast I should like to appeal to Jews, Protestants, and Catholics to defend these presuppositions, which are two: Democracy owes its origin, and it owes its perpetuity, to religion.
When we say the democracy owes its origin to religion we understand the principle of democracy, and not the method of democracy. There is a very fundamental distinction between the two. The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift of God, the Source of Law. The method of democracy, on the contrary, is the particular way in which these rights and liberties are socially ordered. The principle of democracy comes from God, but the method of democracy comes from man. The principle of democracy is not new, though many of its methods are. It is well for us in America to recall this basic distinction between the principle and the method of democracy for too many of us believe that the principle of democracy began with the foundation of America, and that if America ever ceased to exist, democracy would pass out of the world. It would be well to recall that the Church was preaching the dignity of wan over 1700 years before our government came into being. It is also quite wrong for us to judge other nations in terms of their method of government, or to assume that our particular method of democracy alone guarantees and preserves human rights and that if other countries are not patterned after our method of government they are tyrannical. This is untrue. Human rights can be recognized and guaranteed under a monarchy, and they could conceivably be extinguished under certain methods of democracy, where the majority is made equivalent to what is right.
It is as a principle that democracy owes it origin to religion, which teaches that man was endowed with inalienable rights and liberties anterior to any State, because given to him by God. Where, for example, do we get the right to life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, the right to own property, or the right to organize. From the will of the majority? Then the will of the majority could take them away from the minority. From Parliament? Then Parliament could take them away. From the Federal government? Then the Federal government could take them away. Our founding fathers knew this, so they sought about for some basic ground of human rights and liberties which would make man independent of the State or the Dictator or Parliament or the will of a majority, and they found that basic ground and set it down at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
In other words, the principle of democracy, the value of the human person, owes its origin to God. Even more it owes it to Christ, the Son of God who preached to us the worth of a single man, against whom He balanced the entire material universe in His question: “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul” (Mark 8:36)? He died preaching that doctrine, when turning His Head on the Cross to a thief, He addressed him in the second person singular: “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). It is always man that matters. It was for man that the world was made; it is for man the governments exist. It seems therefore rather providential that Christ’s Church should always be the minority in the world; the sheep among wolves; the group whom the world would hate; the one hundred and twenty in the city of Jerusalem; the leaven in the mass; the pearl in the field. Made a minority, the Church could best be custodian of minority rights, the defender of the weak against the strong, and thus be the salt for the preservation of the principles of democracy. No stronger proof that the democratic principle of human dignity is dependent on religion can be offered than the observation that in those countries where God is most defeated man is most tyrannized; where religion is most persecuted, men are most tormented. Slavery passed out of the world thanks to the leaven of Christianity, and slavery has returned to our modern world in proportion to the abandonment of religion. The economic slavery of 19th century Capitalism began when man lost a belief in hell and Divine Judgment; and the Nazi and Communist slavery of the 20th century returned with the “purging” of religion. The gravest danger to American democracy then is not from the outside; it is from the inside — the hearts of citizens in whom the light of faith has gone out. Keep the God who is the origin of authority and you keep the ethical character of authority; reject it and the authority becomes power subject to no law except its own.
Democracy owes its perpetuity to religion, for the reason that religion alone can teach the true nature of man. Democracies sometimes are like ships in the sense that they acquire barnacles. One of these barnacles which attached itself to our method of democracy is the doctrine that man is naturally and infinitely perfectible, and thanks to the blind laws of evolution destined to be ever progressive, to develop into increasingly braver and newer worlds.
This notion of the natural perfectibility of man is not the essence of democracy; it is a theory, and a very false theory at that. The fact is, man is not naturally and indefinitely perfectible; left to himself man is capable of being a fool. This in simple language comes close to what we mean by the doctrine of original sin.
Religion teaches that democracy instead of being perfectible by the laws of evolution is perfectible by the sacrifices of its citizens. Not blind, cosmic necessity, but growth in freedom and a sense of right and duty makes democracy better. Democracy need not be better in 1950 than it is in 1940 — it may conceivably be worse. If it is better it will be for moral reasons, not physical reasons. This false notion of necessary progress assumes that men are like acorns: The mere fact that they are planted means they become great oaks. This is to forget that while an acorn cannot frustrate itself and become a beech or an elm, man can, by the perversion of his will, become even inhuman. Applying this to government, the perpetuation of democracy, religion reminds us, is not automatic, but voluntary; it is moral men which make it work, not laws of nature. Monarchies discovered this too late, as they were challenged by republics on the basis of neglect; democracies will learn it too late also if they rely on social laws rather than moral effort and discipline to right the wrongs which are the sad and tragic aftermath of sin.
The sooner we rid democracy of the barnacle inherited from Rousseau that man becomes better by living, the sooner we will establish an order in which criticism of government will be inseparable from sacrifice. We have not established democracy in America; we are only in the process of establishing it. It is not something that is got by cosmic necessity, like the spurting of an oil well, whose riches we can sit by and contemplate; it is to be won daily, as man wins freedom through the pursuit of truth and goodness. Not even the Declaration of Independence is a completed document; it is in the process of being written through a constantly renewed and awakened sense of moral obligation. The Declaration of Independence is no more a finished thing than birth; it is an original endowment like life, which is progressive through moral effort and obedience to law. It is perhaps true to say that the perfection of democracy depends not upon the fulfillment of one, but three Declarations of Independence: First, the political Declaration of Independence effected by Lincoln, which made all men free and equal before the law; second the economic Declaration of Independence which is awaiting its fulfillment, namely, the lifting of men above the state of proletarians to that of free men, whereby they will be made responsible sharers in an industrial democracy as they are not responsible voters in a political democracy; third, the spiritual Declaration of Independence whereby man, emancipated politically and economically, will be free to save his soul and enjoy the glorious liberty of the children of God — for the tragedy of a poor man is not the he cannot be a full animal, but that he cannot be a free man, on earth as it is in heaven.
When any civilization begins to decline it blames the cracks in its walls to the forces outside itself. Pagan Rome blamed the barbarian hordes from the North, but it was only an excuse. It had already rotted inside. Modern educators blame environment and heredity for immorality and crime of the young, ignoring completely the element of will which is the root of the evil. So too in America, many think that the danger to democracy is from Europe or from across the Pacific. It is not. The gravest threat to our nation is within our nation; namely the loss of standards of morality, the mass defection from God as the source of law and authority, and the want of formal moral training of our young. Democracy is impossible in a chaos. If the laws of health were ignored to the same extent as the laws of God are ignored, 60% of our citizens today would be bedridden. We may not presently see the consequences of the silly belief that social necessity and not moral living creates democracy, but it will tell in the end. It takes some time for a branch cut from a tree to die — but it dies.
Shall our democracy so lose a standard of right and wrong rooted in conscience as to substitute for it the false notion that majority makes right? Then shall our democracy become an arithmocracy, and the principles of morality give way to principles of arithmetic. Then any organized pressure group that can compel a majority against what is morally right, can overthrow the inherent rights of morality. Incidentally, that is why Hitler and Stalin have plebiscites. If numbers make a thing right, then force a majority and you create the illusion that your authority is legitimate. Shall the only time that America will give concrete recognition to religion be when it builds chapels in prisons, when men have already been corrupted by the loss of that which in the beginning would have saved them? Shall we rightly rightly spend millions in defense against enemies landing on our shores, and ignore the break-up of the family through divorce and the wreckage of industrial peace through immoral selfishness and avarice? Shall we write on our coins, “In God we trust”, and spend them without ever thinking of God, or become so lustful for coins that we trust more in them than in God? Shall we rightly open our law-making congresses by invoking the blessing of God, and then be indifferent as to whether our representatives ever bend a knee to God? Shall we pull out our educational hair because a child is never taught the sex life of a frog, but be completely unruffled if the child is never taught that sex is in the domain of ethics?
What are we going to do about it? I mean you Jews, you Protestants, and you Catholics who love America deeply because you love the God who is the foundation of rights and the ground of national conscience. You will probably agree with me that there are three things we must do as a minimum.
First, we must insist on religious education of our young by sending them to the Schules in case of Jews, or to Sunday schools and parochial schools in the case of both Protestants and Catholics; for it is sometimes forgotten that the Protestants have in this country 1795 religious schools and we Catholics have 10,044 religious schools.
Second, we must choose as public officials only those citizens–whether they be Jews, Protestants, or Catholics–who have learned to serve men honestly, by serving God in their consciences.
Third, we must re-enkindle in ourselves a spirit of prayer. God is not with the strong but with the just. And this prayer, as I suggested last Sunday, must be corporate. The Jew in his synagogue and the Protestant in his Church, according to the light of their consciences, and the Catholic at this renewed sacrifice of Calvary in the Mass.
How can we infuse morality into politics if we consider religion as an individual affair? If the laborer considered his economic condition as a purely individual affair, there would have been no economic betterment of the laborer. Leaving religion out of our national life is not like leaving raisins out of a cake, but like leaving an eye out of the body. It is not a negation, but a privation.
If our democracy is to succeed, it will do so only through an increased recognition of duty and self-discipline. We are too much concerned with our rights and not with our duties. We talk about getting our rights from God, but forget that they imply duties to God. Our democracy will survive only as long as we keep our God. When we abandon Him, democracy abandons us. We ought therefore, all of us, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, get down on our knees every day and thank God for the blessings of America. For that reason, in the prayerbook referred to previously, I have included a prayer for our country. Not even those who want to build a Godless slavery in America are willing to leave America for Russia. They would rather undermine our liberties than live under the tyranny they have created by the destruction of those liberties. Believe me, it is no small joy for us Americans to be saved from the immoral politics of a Germany and a Russia, for, unlike their harried peoples, when we hear a loud knocking at the door early in the morning, we can be sure it is only the milkman.
Interplanetary Dust 